Optimism, Idealism, Pancakes

It's nice to dabble, to potter around and pick up whatever information and learning takes your fancy, before moving on. You can acquire a myriad of useful skills or a panoply of useless novelties, if you only dabble. If PhDs were more like dabbling, then mine might have been a pleasure beyond all measure.

Literator: 'A Dabbler In Learning'

The life of a literator is one of constant surprises, including the surprise that it's a lifestyle that has been pretty much abandoned as impractical in the modern era. The pressure of staying alive, fed and housed leaves very little option for dabbling unless you're supremely free of responsibility. For all intents and purposes, the life of a literator is an unattainable one as it implies a lack of drive and therefore a lack of employability. Is that true though?

In the Western culture, we are generally told to be the same as each other, with the goals of a good job, your own family, an owned house, and overheads that would make even an elephant shudder in sympathy with the weight bearing down upon us. It is very much a 'work now, enjoy after you're dead' attitude and it is on many levels a lie. We don't all HAVE to be the same, and in fact we are duty bound to ourselves to be truer to ourselves than to the template peer pressure is pushing in upon us. Hence, the life of the word 'literator' in popular usage was brief, eventually referring to 'petty schoolmasters' and 'those who dabble in trifles' before vanishing completely. Now I only refer to it having done the usual stumbling about in the Phrontistery, looking for interesting terms, and then tumbling down the hill of comprehension to where we are now. We don't have to live the life society has tried to imprint upon us. We don't have to believe that potential lie, or the big lies provided by many other parts of the world as we know it.

This is going pretty well for a day without a topic. Sometimes such an endeavour works out, and sometimes it doesn't. In recent events, the Film Bin recording drought continued, interview day preparations continued, a cold wave struck and a steady diet of 'Star Trek', 'The Six Million Dollar Man', 'The Addams Family', 'Mork And Mindy' and 'The Adventures of Superman' is beginning to produce wonderful results. Yes, world, you tried to bring cynicism down upon us all but we have the tools to build back up to the stars. There is something magical about the idealism of vintage television. It's a wonderful thing, and one so few people now seem to appreciate. Yes, I might be writing through the rose-tinted keyboard of nostalgia, but the world is going to have to get a lot less cynical if we're going to enjoy living on it. Come on, people, we can do it, if only for the other 'Star Trek' fans: Optimism, idealism, pancakes! Oh, pancakes? Really? Who on Earth likes pancakes? Bleuch. Still, some people must, so again: Optimism, idealism, pancakes!

O.